In the order of importance, I am a mother, I’m a wife and I take anything that has to do with my family seriously. I have siblings and I have a mum b… - Olanike Adeyemo

Of course, there are a lot. Lead causes cancer and other things we saw when I did my research. The impact is not only on animals. We eat fish and we accumulate this in our bodies. When you take a fish that has been exposed to lead, some of those things will be in its flesh and liver and when you eat it, you are also being exposed to lead. So, whatever we push into the environment eventually comes back to us because we are higher animals but it takes longer for those effects to manifest in us because of our body mass and all that.

I didn’t choose Vet Medicine. You know how it is with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board and during my time, there were few professions parents wanted their children to go into. Parents wanted their children to become lawyers, doctors, and engineers during my time. If you were good at science subjects, they wanted you to become a doctor. When I took the University Matriculation Examination (now Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination), my parents chose Medicine but I did not meet the cutoff mark. I later changed my choice of course of study. One of my dad’s friends, a professor of Veterinary Medicine, said he would have loved me to study Vet Medicine but he said it was too tough that I would not be able to cope. But that was a challenge to me and because he said I would not be able to cope, I said that was what I wanted and that was how I ended up in Veterinary Medicine.

There is the need to explore the field more and sponsor research on epidemiological study. We need to know why more people are dying of renal failure, liver cancer and kidney problems when they do not indulge in attitude or have conditions that expose them to the diseases.